Helping patients understand how they can support their recovery and giving them more confidence to meet their own care needs has led to a national award for nursing lecturer Dr Annemarie Brown.

Dr Brown received the Patient Wellbeing Award at the Journal of Wound Care Awards 2014 for her research on reducing leg ulcer recurrence rates.

As part of this work she developed the ‘VeLUSET’ tool to help clinicians assess the ability of patients to undertake their own care and understand why they might not follow through the advice and guidance they are being given to support their recovery.

Dr Brown said: “I have always been interested in preventing venous ulcer recurrence and realised that patients could undertake self-care activities which would help reduce the incidence. I looked at the literature on the self-care activities such as elevation, exercises, wearing compression hosiery and decided that I needed an evidence-based health behaviour change model which would encourage patients to undertake these activities.

“The model I chose was self-efficacy, which has had very positive outcomes in changing health behaviour including Weight Watchers, smoking cessation and other areas. Self-efficacy is also a very simple model to operationalise and is based on the principle that people will change their behaviour if they feel confident that they will be successful.”

She said her research and commitment to understanding the patient’s needs, attitudes and personal perspectives are informing her work in the School of Health and Human Sciences.

She said: “I feel it is a privilege to be part of shaping future nurses. I will make it my mission to ensure my students have a good understanding of tissue viabiity and it is an advantage that I can do this at the beginning of their career to ensure they don’t pick up any bad habits!”